Robert Drew

Robert Drew was a pioneer documentary filmmaker and considered by many as the forerunner of Direct Cinema. Nevertheless, unlike his fellow filmmakers, Drew was almost forgotten by media and film studies, and only occasionally was he was mentioned as a producer. It was not until the early 1980s that he gained recognition as an influential filmmaker.(1) He initially worked as a writer for Life magazine. The observational and non-interventional techniques used by magazine photojournalists inspired him to develop similar techniques for television newsreels and film journalism, which until then had been dominated by traditional documentary styles (specifically, those of John Grierson and Robert Flaherty). P. O'Connell, in his biography of Drew, claims that Drew's efforts to revolutionize television journalism was regrettably minimal. However, his techniques had a major influence on documentary filmmaking. “[His] impact on the documentary was so fundamental that almost all later developments owe some debt to his pioneering efforts.”(2) Drew called this new approach “ Living cinema,”(3) a concept reminiscent of Verov’s “the cinema of fact,”(4) a cinema that records life-as-it-is. Robert Drew established a production group called Drew Associates and produced about twenty films.

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Many considered this film as one of the most influential documentaries in the history of American Cinema and Robert Drew’s best film ever. He made the film in collaboration with other filmmakers in his association. It is the first film of a trilogy known as Drew’s Kennedy films; the other two films are: Crisis (1963), and Faces of November(1964). The film revolves around the 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary election, following the campaign of the two candidates: John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. Richard Barsam praise the the film for its political objectivity “the filmmakers are there to record and to reveal, not to interpret...the narration is impartial. ”(1)